US-based company Clinverse has raised US$3.8 million in a Series B financing round to expand the client base for its ClinPay cloud-based financial-management software, which automates and streamlines payments to investigator-site teams conducting clinical trials (CTs).
The Series B round was led by Hatteras Venture Partners of Durham, North Carolina, with Vital Financial of Bethesda, Maryland also contributing.
Hatteras general partner and co-founder John Crumpler said Clinverse had “already solved one of the biggest challenges to biopharma companies of all sizes, which is paying investigators to perform clinical trials”.
The company is uniquely positioned in that it offers “the only secure data-pod technology solution that is commercially available and in use by customers to manage the financial and administrative complexities of clinical trials”, Crumpler added.
US$70 billion market
Clinverse’s market is the US$70 billion paid each year to service providers to perform clinical trials.
According to the company, research shows that up to one third of the time spent on conducting trials is taken up with administration and financial management that is still “largely error-prone, manual and dependent on cobbled-together software systems”.
Particularly galling, it says, is the lag time for payment: “Investigator sites have said they are sometimes owed tens of thousands of dollars per trial in payments that are overdue by more than six months”.
Real-time information
The ClinPay cloud-based software provides real-time information on costs and automates payments to investigators.
With global payment capabilities extending across 140 currencies, the platform electronically tracks investigator grants and compares agreements with trial operational data, so that it can make accurate payments to investigators for completed patient procedures.
As Clinverse points out, the clinical trials industry in the US is also facing more burdensome regulatory requirements around investigator-site payments, as mandated in the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
